Posted
by
timothyon Wednesday February 25, 2009 @03:33PM
from the is-it-just-me-or-does-guild-sound-medieval? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The president of the Authors Guild has launched a rant in the NY Times about how the Kindle 2 provides Text-to-Speech capabilities that, oh the horror, allow the user to have any text on the Kindle read to her. Roy Blunt, Jr. moans that this is copyright infringement of audio books, and that Kindle users should be forced to pay royalties on audio even though they've already paid for the text version of a book! Amazingly he harps on about how TTS technology has become so good that it may replace humans — and then uses this to argue that it's unfair for Kindle to provide TTS! I think the Authors Guild need a new president — someone less of a Luddite, and more familiar with copyright law." (See also the Guild's executive director's similar claims that reading aloud, royalty-free, is an illegal function of software.)

The fact that there have been few murders lately means that the prohibition on murder isn't needed. People who don't want to be killed are doing just fine without laws against murder, as evidenced by the fact that they so rarely have to be enforced; we should get rid of them for good.

Whoa, scary distopian world these cameras will cause! Let's outlaw laws too, since presumably someone could make a law that said you had to hire plumbers from the plumbers union! We should outlaw cops as well, since they might enforce a pro-plumber union stance even if it isn't encoded into law.

>two spaces after the end of a sentence seems to be too much to ask for

Kids don't use typewriters. That rule only applies to typewriters because they are monospaced. Modern typography using proportional fonts is designed for one space after a period. Are you an old grandma?